


Mercy of the Black

by jane_potter



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Angst, Community: st_xi_kink, Dubious Consent, Grief, Kink Meme, M/M, Non-Graphic Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-06
Updated: 2010-10-06
Packaged: 2017-10-12 11:28:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/124380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jane_potter/pseuds/jane_potter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Swallowing, Ayel had a moment to convince himself that Nero had simply lost all conception of personal space in his desire to observe Ayel's work. Then, without warning, hard hands grabbed the upper arms of his greatcoat and yanked it from his shoulders.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mercy of the Black

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Sineala, whose incredible and criminally under-exposed story Firefalls heavily influenced my conception of Nero and Ayel to the point that hir characterisations of them are now my personal head canon whenever I rewatch the movie. Mouse over Rihan text to read in English.

Genetics had been far less kind to Rihannsu than Vulcans. From the murky reaches of their shared ancestry, Rihannsu derived a genetic flaw which gave to some a peculiar mutation, a curse which made skin contact break open the barriers between minds, stealing emotion, violating private memories, unwittingly forcing thoughts upon another. They simply called it the Touch.

It was uncontrollable, varying in strength from one to another, often surfacing from dormancy with unnerving irregularity. Ayel's Touch came and went with the _rihan_ moon cycle, a biological pattern that continued unaltered even into this other reality, where he was out of time with the satellites that still circled a hundred-year-younger ch'Rihan. Nero was one who had the Touch upon him nearly all the time, and in terrifying power. He had gone into screaming convulsions at the very instant their old planet had cracked in two, his mind overloaded and then broken by the collective mental deathcry of an entire planet.

Ayel knew how his captain carried with him the last tortured cries of an entire people, no longer able to comprehend that there was a place in this new galaxy where ch'Rihan still thrived. He could not be convinced otherwise. And Ayel, who had held Nero through the seizures, stopped him from choking on his own vomit, kept him from biting off his own tongue, had been able to feel a mere fraction of that agony.

The sensations Nero had inadvertently forced into Ayel's mind were indelible, scarring, leaving cauterised gouges in his memories. Sometimes he dreamed of dying a billion deaths at once and woke unable to remember whether Nero was right or wrong, if Ayel was only imagining the pull of ch'Rihan's moons on his own Touch like a phantom limb of the mind.

Few enough Rihannsu had the Touch, but those who were burdened by it often found themselves unable to function in society, where physical contact was a risk in every crowded room and busy street. They were the kind of people who sought isolation, whether in guarding far-flung outposts, manning solitary stations on moons or hostile planets, herding farmbeasts in the vast expanses of ch'Rihan's veldt or simply getting off-planet altogether by finding work on a sparsely crewed ship that routinely went months without interacting with other living creatures.

The _Narada_ was one such ship, a five mile-long mining vessel that had been outfitted for the longest and harshest of deep space outings, habitable only to those who valued honest, brutal work over comfort of any kind, and nearly every crewman aboard had the Touch. They were loners both by nature and necessity, taking solace in the emptiness of the void where others might be driven mad by it. Each of them avoided skin contact as a matter of habit, rather than as the afterthought of normal people. In an optimal situation, the concentration of Touched Rihannsu was a blessing none of them had ever had before.

The death of ch'Rihan and all her people was unspeakably far from an optimal situation. Ayel had never imagined a time or situation in which grieving alone could possibly be better than seeking comfort and solace in the arms of another. But fractured as they were, they could not risk inflicting the torture of a touch on each other, or it would consume them all long before the appropriate time had come, their vengeance oaths left unfulfilled.

If any two or three of them had ever grieved together, it was kept quiet in a way that few _rihan_ emotions ever were. Ayel did not want to know. In the new world of their formerly inconceivable agony, he understood that some things were too private to intrude upon with attention.

*

The primal neurons of Ayel's spine knew he was being watched long before his mind could reasonably register it. Every muscle in his back knotted to unbearable tension as the sensation grew, heavy and low and nauseous, like a belly full of slag. Against his will, Ayel's posture took on the self-conscious correctness of a watched man.

As he tested the strands of cable plugged into the outlet panel on the bulkhead before him, searching for broken lines, Ayel felt his captain prowling back and forth behind him. His gut clenched in a mixture of attention, anticipation, worship and wariness that only Nero commanded. Nonetheless, he continued to work.

Silence was often Nero's way, self-imposed and brooding. Sometimes, for hours or even days, it seemed that Nero couldn't believe his crew were more than another handful of the ghosts that haunted his broken mind; he would lurk endlessly in their periphery, almost skittish in his conflicting need and disbelief, drinking them in as water to a dying man. Or it could have been that Nero was in no mood for talking and simply wanted to watch Ayel's steady obedience, or gauge him for signs of burgeoning discontent, or just stare at the nape of his neck as if measuring it for a dagger's thrust. With Nero, it was impossible to know. The best Ayel could ever do was guess, try to accommodate, and pray he didn't guess wrong once too often.

Callused fingertips traced over the crown of Ayel's head, sudden and _far_ too close. Sour breath ghosted over the back of his neck. He came to attention without meaning to, slugged low in the belly by instinctual foreboding.

"Nero--"

The captain's stubble rasped the nape of his neck, jawline and sharp cheekbone nestling up against the soft flesh over Ayel's thudding jugular. A long, upswept eyebrow grazed his earlobe. The fine tremors of an alien presence made his skin prickle, Nero's horrific Touch threatening in even the barest of skin contacts.

Swallowing, Ayel had a moment to convince himself that Nero had simply lost all conception of personal space in his desire to observe Ayel's work. Then, without warning, hard hands grabbed the upper arms of his greatcoat and yanked it from his shoulders. Ayel sucked in a sharp breath between clenched teeth. His reflexive wrench against entrapment made the seams of his coat strain, heavy leather creaking, but his arms remained trapped in the sleeves.

Nero's hands slid around Ayel's middle, stilling his protest, only to grab the dangling sleeves and yank them back. Arms crossed over his front and bound tight to his sides by the knotted sleeves Nero was tying at Ayel's back, Ayel found himself bewildered and seriously alarmed in the face of a rapidly unravelling situation the likes of which he'd never faced before.

In low Rihan, Ayel demanded, "Nero. _Daise'Enarrain, vah 'hh kumn'ai_?"

Of all the questions Ayel ever wanted to ask Nero, it was always the foremost in his mind, and yet the least frequently voiced.

A knee between his legs pressed him forward. The unshaven point of Nero's chin dug into his shoulder, something like an embrace transmitted in the desperate press of Nero's face against his throat-- and desperate it truly was. Ayel flinched at the feeling of Nero's raw need scraping for entrance to his mind. A lost sound trembled across Ayel's collar bones.

Wandering hands explored his front, as patiently and thoroughly as one examined every muscle and joint of a nervous _fvai_ on the auction block. The thick fabric of Ayel's greatcoat muted the immediacy of Nero's hands, but soon enough they came to the hem of his tunic, below his bound arms. Slowly, fingers worked beneath his tunic, unlacing just enough of the side ties that Nero could slip a hand beneath the garment. Rough calluses scraped his skin.

" _Aeek'vah aihr_, Nero..."

He felt Nero's pause, deliberate and vaguely menacing in its expectancy of the single correct answer.

Ayel closed his eyes, pointlessly bitter at how irrelevant his consent was, and bowed his head to the bulkhead.

"... _sthe'aeusnnta vah khia rhoinnie_," he finished hoarsely.

A long breath hissed out across his skin, the next inhale juddering on a sob. Nero shuddered and pressed his body against Ayel's, driving him up against the bulkhead. Sharp teeth worked up the arc of his ear, delicately cruel.

Tense and unyielding, Ayel stood unmoved by the caresses and clawing, but in the unfurling curve of Nero's mean smile against his neck, he knew there was no deception between them. Nero felt the eagerness mingled with anger, the undeniable want beneath his horror-- felt it both in the stir of Ayel's flesh and the cleave of his mind opening to Nero's Touch like an overripe fruit.

The deep vaults of his most private self were exposed and vulnerable as Nero carded through them, flitting from memory to impression to thought, touching the dark ones so awful that they consumed and the sweet ones so powerful they dragged tears to Ayel's eyes. And there, for each good and each bad, pressed a matching thought of Nero's, two separate lives blurring together as the Touch dragged down the walls between them, collapsing into a downwards spiral of raw sensation and unfettered emotion, messy and painful and awful and real, the sharp edges of their shattered psyches cutting each other further to ribbons.

What it came to was more than Ayel had hoped for and less than he'd feared. It was fast hard rutting against the bulkhead, bodies undulating together in a rite of frustrated grief, fresh sorrow-signs carved by teeth and nails alongside the permanent marks already inked into Ayel's flesh. Breath driven harshly from his throat with every jarring thrust, Ayel ground out splintered syllables of encouragement in Rihan and Nero gasped his responses in the tongue of pain, broken moans and soft animal cries that had nothing to do with their coupling and everything to do with the hot tears that slid down Ayel's back, silent and slippery.

Pleasure came secondary to the act, bittersweet. Ayel tasted salt in the back of his mouth from his own swallowed tears by the time he reached completion, spilling into Nero's strangely careful palm with a desperate grunt and a single jerk of his hips. Some time later, rocking and grinding it out of himself slowly, Nero came as though he were in dull agony.

Lost in the heat of Ayel's body and the darkness behind his own eyelids, Nero groaned a name Ayel had never heard before-- a name that he was never meant to have heard, probably once whispered in wonder against the pregnant belly of a long-dead wife by an entirely different man than the one that grimly shuddered out the aftershocks against Ayel's back, then whole and blissful in not knowing how fate would soon break him.

"Ten years," Nero rasped, consonants catching in his throat. His jaw worked against Ayel's neck. "Today, Ayel. Ten years that they've gone unavenged."

"Soon," Ayel promised quietly, lying as mercifully as he knew how. "Soon."


End file.
